The Portal has revealed the best of mankind What if our worst instincts are actually our best?

Except, no, that wasn’t what happened; or, at least, it wasn’t all of what happened. “Portal to hell,” was what the New York Post called it: “Live Dublin-NYC video art installation already bringing out the worst in people with lewd displays.” It reported with a mixture of feigned dismay and barely repressed glee that “middle-finger exchanges and other lewd gestures are a common means of communication on both sides of the portal”.

The portal had only been open for a few hours when the Gardai had to forcibly remove a young woman who was “grinding her bum” on the screen on the Irish end of the connection. Drunken Dubliners have taken to waving swastikas or images of the burning towers of the World Trade Center at their American counterparts. In response, an American TikTokker flashed her breasts, claiming she wanted to show Dubliners her “two New York home-grown potatoes”.

Those of us for whom capitalising the word “Portal” immediately conjures the brilliant videogame about a laboratory experiment run by an insane computer will have sniffed trouble from the off. Likewise, those of us who have ever found ourselves in Dublin at pub kicking-out time. But even those who don’t have either of those reference points should have been able to see it coming. 

For isn’t the fate of the portals just a microcosm of the internet itself? The wired world seemed to promise a new era of global human connection, that would allow us to share the fruits of our knowledge, expand our communities, banish misunderstanding and widen our spheres of empathy. Instead, we turned 90% of it over to showing each-other our furry bits and used the rest of it to insult people we’d never even met, ambush innocent passers-by with Goatse or blue waffle, and ensure that death threats, rape threats and the music of Rick Astley spread at scale. And, yes, share a few cute pictures of cats. Thank heavens, at least, for those. Humanity is a many-splendoured thing.

These portals, on the other hand, can’t in any obvious way be used to siphon our personal information into the pockets of Mark Zuckerberg, derail democracy, hound people to death or reshape the world irrevocably in the interests of soulless capital. They can be regarded as a more benign and lower-stakes metonym for what the internet gave us; and, accordingly, the behaviours they brought out aren’t really going to do much harm.  

One can disapprove of much of the rowdiness — nobody’s going to defend the trolls waving swastikas — but doesn’t something in you respond, sneakingly, with a little leap of old-world pride that, home-grown potatoes aside, Dubliners are apparently proving so much ruder than New Yorkers? Here is a response that would be recognisable to Chaucer, Rabelais or the traditions of Commedia dell’Arte.

It is also a teachable moment. Whenever we are tempted to imagine that some technological gizmo will transform human behaviour and usher in a new Age of Aquarius, we are brought rapidly down to earth. Technologies don’t change human behaviour: they simply amplify it. Pace the New York Post, “bringing out the worst in people” is just what technologies are going to do. We’re all still apes, with ape brains and ape instincts. When we see someone peering at us, our instincts may tell us to smile and wave — but more often, as with chimpanzees at the zoo, they tell us to fling something at the bars. 

We’d like to see the whole world as one big family, but Dunbar’s Number — saying we’re not neurologically equipped to handle a personal network of more than 150 people — means we struggle a little with the principle. We look through a magic portal, see some wazzock in cycle shorts in Manhattan, and instead of greeting him as a brother in humanity, there’s some part of us that thinks: “That’s a stranger, and a foreigner, and therefore funny, and what’s more he can’t get me from there: I should pull down my trousers and wave my bum at him.”

Here, then, is (mostly) amiable misrule. It’s lols. It’s craic. It manifests the unruliness, the corporeality, the boisterousness that’s the best of us as well as the most annoying of us. It’s just that boisterousness that derails utopian projects and reminds the self-serious and vainglorious that they belong in the mud with the rest of us. So here’s to grindy-bum girl.

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Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator. His forthcoming book, The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, is out in September.

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